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Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Blurred Lines

Sometimes my real life creeps into my books. For instance, I have two dogs, Ethel Merman and Ella Fitzgerald. I'd written the Everything But... trilogy about a Hungarian grandmother who'd accidentally cursed her family to bad weddings, then she started a second trilogy where she was playing matchmaker. I needed a way to end the series and...I don't think I'm giving too much away when I say Nana Vancy started matchmaking homeless dogs to their forever families! She's made a couple cameos in other books fixing up families with dogs.

The dogs even made the cover...

That's just one of the many ways my real life infiltrates my writing. I call those pieces, Easter Eggs. They're sprinkled throughout my stories. Some only I recognize, but some are pretty blatant so readers can find them. Just One Thing takes places mainly on Mondays...that was an Easter Egg for my social media friends who know all about my Monday Glee!

So imagine my surprise when lines blurred and suddenly my fictional story crept into my real life! In my new release, Carry Her Heart, the heroine has a wild garden in her backyard. I wrote a scene I fell in love with where she's planted some milkweed and is reflecting on life in general..."Maybe we all repeatedly curl up in a chrysalis and emerge as something else entirely." I loved that entire scene. Frankly, though I have a big garden here, I fell in love with Piper's milkweed. Which might explain why I found myself at a Master Gardeners' plant sale last weekend. I have my own butterfly garden plants now...we're starting to dig them a new home today.

I'm used to my real life influencing my fiction, and when I started writing this blog, I thought I'd end by saying that now there are blurred lines and my fiction is influencing my real life...but as I wrote this, I realized that's wrong. My writing has influenced my real life in so many ways. There's a saying about most people live one life, but readers live hundreds (or more). The same can be said of writing. Whether I'm writing romantic comedies like Everything But a Dog, or emotional women's fiction/romances like Carry Her Heart, those characters live with me for months as I write them. I literally walk a mile (or more) in their shoes. That can't help but impact my life.